Andrew Revkin asked me to provide comments on this article of his where the National Climatic Data Center was asked to respond to Watts et al 2012:A Closer Look at Climate Studies Promoted Before PublicationHere is what I sent to him:My comments on Thorne’s response are pretty simple.They still refuse to get out of the office, to examine firsthand the condition of the network and try to come up with hands on approaches for dealing with station inhomogeneity, but instead focus of trying to spot patterns in data and massage it. In my view this is the wrong approach and...

From the Harvard University news service and the what are they smoking department, comes this suggestion that apparently it never was ozone damaging CFC refrigerants at all, it was those nasty thunderstorms wot done it. They say: “Recent studies have suggested that the number and intensity of such storms are linked to climate changes…which could in turn lead to increased ozone loss and greater levels of harmful UV radiation reaching the Earth’s surface, and potentially higher rates of skin cancer.” I have a pretty hard time believing this one, because, well, it’s like Rube Goldberg machine construct where lots of...

Billions of years ago, before Earth's atmosphere had oxygen, it periodically possessed a "haze" of organic chemicals including methane, boffins have discovered. During these periods the planet's air was more like that of Titan, ice moon of Saturn, than the stuff we breathe today. "Models have previously suggested that the Earth's early atmosphere could have been warmed by a layer of organic haze," says Dr Aubrey Zerkle of Newcastle uni. "Our geochemical analyses of marine sediments from this time period provide the first evidence for such an atmosphere." According to Zerkle and his colleagues, during the period 2.5 to 2.65...

WASHINGTON – The verdict is in: Global warming is occurring and emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activity are the main cause. This, according to Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at UC Berkeley, MacArthur Fellow and co-founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project..... ....Benjamin D. Santer, a climate researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a lead author of the 1995 U.N. climate report, said he welcomed the involvement of another research group into “detection and attribution” of climate change and its causes. But he also said he found it troubling that Muller claimed such definitive...

Plant owners and operators report to EIA that they expect to retire almost 27 gigawatts (GW) of capacity from 175 coal-fired generators between 2012 and 2016. In 2011, there were 1,387 coal-fired generators in the United States, totaling almost 318 GW. The 27 GW of retiring capacity amounts to 8.5% of total 2011 coal-fired capacity. The coal-fired capacity expected to be retired over the next five years is more than four times greater than retirements performed during the preceding five-year period (6.5 GW). Moreover, based on EIA data, the approximate 9 GW of coal-fired capacity retirements expected to occur in...

It’s all up on Watts Up now. What Anthony Watts and Evan Jones have revealed is breathtaking, a must see. Half of the warming trend has gone. 92% of the artificial rise was due to” erroneous adjustments of well sited stations”. Muller et al used an older siting classification system. The new classification system shows that siting does have a major impact on the data.We always knew thermometers were never meant to be stuck next to air-conditioners. Now we know they shouldn’t be recording global warming near airports either.Go and Visit Watts Up and enjoy! I’ll be posting my own analysis...

Have a look at this chart. It tells you pretty much all you need to know about the much-anticipated scoop by Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That? What it means, in a nutshell, is that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – the US government body in charge of America's temperature record, has systematically exaggerated the extent of late 20th century global warming. In fact, it has doubled it.

PRESSÂ RELEASE Posted on July 29, 2012 by Anthony Watts PRESS RELEASE Â– July 29th, 2012 12PM PDT Â– FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEA reanalysis of U.S. surface station temperatures has been performed using the recently WMO-approved Siting Classification System devised by METEO-FranceÂ’s Michel Leroy. The new siting classification more accurately characterizes the quality of the location in terms of monitoring long-term spatially representative surface temperature trends. The new analysis demonstrates that reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled, with 92% of that over-estimation resulting from erroneous NOAA adjustments of well-sited stations upward. The paper is the first to use the updated...

The Obama Deception is a hard-hitting film that completely destroys the myth that Barack Obama is working for the best interests of the American people. The Obama phenomenon is a hoax carefully crafted by the captains of the New World Order. He is being pushed as savior in an attempt to con the American people into accepting global slavery. We have reached a critical juncture in the New World Order's plans. It's not about Left or Right: it's about a One World Government. The international banks plan to loot the people of the United States and turn them into slaves...

Strong summer thunderstorms that pump water high into the upper atmosphere pose a threat to the protective ozone layer over the United States, researchers said on Thursday, drawing one of the first links between climate change and ozone loss over populated areas. In a study published online by the journal Science, Harvard University scientists reported that some storms send water vapor miles into the stratosphere — which is normally drier than a desert — and showed how such events could rapidly set off ozone-destroying reactions with chemicals that remain in the atmosphere from CFCs, refrigerant gases that are now banned....

<p>The Greenland ice sheet melted at a faster rate this month than at any other time in recorded history, with virtually the entire ice sheet showing signs of thaw.</p>
<p>The rapid melting over just four days was captured by three satellites. It has stunned and alarmed scientists, and deepened fears about the pace and future consequences of climate change.</p>

Atmospheric feedback loops can be rather swift, geologically speakingThe time lag between increased quantities of CO2 reaching or leaving the atmosphere and global temperature change may be far shorter than previously thought, according to a new paper, Tightened constraints on the time-lag between Antarctic temperature and CO2 during the last deglaciation published this week by Climate of the Past.The paper states its claims by suggesting other ice-core-based assessments of the correlation between CO2 prevalence and global temperature use samples from a region of Antarctica where ice accumulates slowly, making conclusions on the age of air bubbles difficult. This new research...

Get ready Â— for all the fears of extreme weather coming our way Â— studies of Queensland, Victoria, the whole of SE Australia, New Zealand, and Perth show that either nothing is changing (there have always been bad storms) or possibly, the weather is better now than it used to be. Where is the evidence to support the claims by alarmists that increasing CO2 will make Â“extreme weatherÂ” more common?ItÂ’s less windy now across South East Australia than it was in the 1920â€˛s. ItÂ’s less stormy on the southern coast of Victoria, and records that go back 7000 years...

Just yesterday the Energy Information Administration (EIA) put out a new study on the major reserves of shale gas and tight oil. Hydraulic fracturing has led energy producers and scientists to completely reassess America’s oil and natural gas reserves. In North Dakota, the Bakken Shale is a huge source of this tight oil; however, it is only the third biggest in the entire country. In North Dakota they have seen unemployment drop to 3 percent due to the large effort to explore oil options in the Bakken Shale. If this is only the third largest source in the country, imagine...

Geoengineering hopes revived as study of iron-fertilized algal blooms shows they deposit carbon in the deep ocean when they die. In the search for methods to limit global warming, it seems that stimulating the growth of algae in the oceans might be an efficient way of removing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere after all. Despite other studies suggesting that this approach was ineffective, a recent analysis of an ocean-fertilization experiment eight years ago in the Southern Ocean indicates that encouraging algal blooms to grow can soak up carbon that is then deposited in the deep ocean as the algae...

I noticed with my morning coffee that Tom Nelson had a Google Trends graph that piqued my interest, so I decided to expand upon it a bit before getting back to work. After looking at my results, the title of this post could just as easily be “off the radar”. Have a look: Source: Google TrendsYou can clearly see when An Inconvenient Truth was released, the 2007 IPCC report and subsequent Nobel prize, and when Climategate occurred. That Gore blip in the summer of 2010 was the “Sex Poodle” episode.Here’s a similar graph with the maximum number of relevant phrases...

ndur Goklany calculated that biofuels policies killed nearly 200,000 people Â in 2010 alone. That was before this study showed things may be worse than we suspected. Brazil is the largest sugar cane ethanol producer in the world, but people are burning four times the area of sugar cane plantations than previously realized, and itÂ’s producing far more pollution than they thought. For every unit of energy generated, the ethanol-biofuel use produces a lot less CO2 (plant fertilizer) but more volatile organic compounds (VOCÂ’s), more carbon monoxide, more nitrous oxides, as well as more sulphur dioxides. (See Graph b below).Compared to...

Last week, during an entertaining display of comedic jujitsu about the Obamas’ awkward “kiss cam” moment, Jon Stewart managed to subtly relitigate the 2000 Election, saying that had Al Gore won, the “Earth’s temperature would be maybe a few degrees cooler.” It is tempting - and perhaps comforting - to dismiss Stewart’s snark-infused banter solely as sour grapes, both with a bygone election and President Obama’s failures. That, however, would be a mistake. Stewart’s lightly disguised political commentary reflects a reinvigorated radical environmentalist movement that hopes to leverage the summer heatwave and drought into legislative action on global warming...er, climate...

YOU don’t have to be a climate scientist these days to know that the climate has problems. You just have to step outside. The United States is now enduring its warmest year on record, and the 13 warmest years for the entire planet have all occurred since 1998, according to data that stretches back to 1880. No one day’s weather can be tied to global warming, of course, but more than a decade’s worth of changing weather surely can be, scientists say. Meanwhile, the country often seems to be moving further away from doing something about climate change, with the...

A new study by a University of Michigan professor shows Americans between the ages of 32 and 52 - a group referred to as Generation X - have said they don’t really care when it comes to matters of climate change and the environment. Jon D. Miller directs the Longitudinal Study of American Youth at the U-M Institute for Social Research and released a quarterly report this week. The research has been funded by the National Science Foundation since 1986. Generation X, which consists of people born between the years of the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, apparently cares much...

The proponents of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) believe that CO2, generally accepted as a weak greenhouse gas, is responsible for the gradual rise of global temperatures, commencing with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, circa 1850. Ironically, this purported close correlation is in itself proof positive that the very basis of AGW theory is wrong. I don’t agree. Here is my reasoning: First, I posit that the many climatologists and other scientists who subscribe to AGW also subscribe to the essentials of the scientific method; very briefly, this refers to identifying a problem, gathering relevant data, drawing a hypothesis, followed...

Consistent rain and warm temperatures may have given the Mongols the energy source they needed to conquer Eurasia: grass for their horses (huge amount of grass needed to feed the 10 horses for each Mongol warrior).

First, correcting an error that originated with the blog The Hockey Schtick about not giving appropriate credit. Marcel Crok writes on De staat van het klimaat One of the basic principles of blogging is to give credit when credit is due. I always try to mention the source of my information and most blogs do this using an acronym like h/t (hat tip). This week one of my own blog articles was not referred to as the source for another blog article on The Hockey Schtick. This blog then alerted WUWT? who brought the same news quite loudly and then...

Operation Cabin Q&As (from the Norfolk Police here PDF) The following questions and answers are an abridged version of Norfolk Constabulary’s Operation Cabin media briefing held on Thursday 19 July 2012.How do you know it was an external hack?In outline terms, we know it came via the internet from a number of different IP addresses, in various countries, which may have been proxy servers. The attack was, first of all, into the web server (CRUweb8) in the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the UEA. From there, a link was established to a CRU back-up server (CRUback3).It’s fair to say, the...

German researchers have re-ignited debate over geo-engineering by saying that “seeding” oceans with iron is an effective way to lock up CO2. While the principle behind seeding is simple enough – the iron acts as a fertilizer for phytoplankton, which multiply and consume carbon dioxide as they grow – the topic is fiercely debated. The core of the argument is also simple: it’s probably impossible to predict what other environmental impacts phytoplankton fertilization would have. The researchers, led by Victor Smetacek from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, are reporting the results of a 2004...

Posted on July 19, 2012 by Anthony Watts I’ve never done a double feature before where our Climate Craziness of the Week and Quote of the Week are one and the same. 350.org’s Bill McKibben gets this unique honor.From the what universe does Bill McKibben live in department? While going on about heat waves, he comes up with the ultimate “I don’t understand science” zinger. How long before people stop listening to this guy? I would not have believed he’d be disturbed enough to write this if I hadn’t read it as a direct quote written by his own hand.Hat...

UPDATE: less than 24 hours after posting this, we already have an end of the world prediction naming global warming, see below. New end of the world book treats climate change just like many other end of times worries that have not come to pass. Weston, FL — (SBWIRE) — 07/16/2012 — The end of the world is not going to happen within our lifetimes. That’s the word from Justin Deering, author of The End of the World Delusion: How Doomsayers Endanger Society. “We’re bombarded with end-of-the-world scares practically everywhere you look,” Deering explains. “You hear about it in church, on...

From the told ya so department, comes this recently presented paper at the European Geosciences Union meeting. Authors Steirou and Koutsoyiannis, after taking homogenization errors into account find global warming over the past century was only about one-half [0.42°C] of that claimed by the IPCC [0.7-0.8°C]. ------------------------------------------------ Here’s the part I really like: of 67% of the weather stations examined, questionable adjustments were made to raw data that resulted in: “increased positive trends, decreased negative trends, or changed negative trends to positive,” whereas “the expected proportions would be 1/2 (50%).” And… “homogenation practices used until today are mainly statistical, not...

The head of Iran’s cultural heritage and tourism organization believes that in addition to economic sanctions, the West is launching another kind of “soft war” on the Islamic republic. Speaking at a ceremony to introduce the nation’s new meteorological department chief, Hassan Mousavi, said that he was “suspicious about the drought in the southern part of the country.” He went on to accuse the West as using “technology” to influence the nation’s climate, saying sand storms, droughts, and other extreme weather were the result of an unspecified method of war. … Last year, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused Western countries...

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe. Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest...

It’s business as usual at the Petermann glacier, doing what a glacier does, calving ice into the sea. We reported on another chunk in 2010, four Manhattans in size. Borrowing from an oft used media ploy, at this rate, it will be down to ice cube size in ten years. I wonder though, if we’d ever have noticed any of this without MODIS? Keep that in mind when reading the claims.At left An ice island twice the size of Manhattan has calved from Petermann Glacier off northern Greenland. At right, the 2010 calving, with the crack for the new chunk...

Earlier today, certain Congressional Democrats let it be known that their party would be ready and willing to take the country over the coming fiscal cliff if Republicans don’t agree to President Obama’s proposal to hike taxes on the country’s wealthiest earners (but remember: Republicans are ones refusing to cooperate and causing all of this dat gum partisan gridlock!). A top Senate Democrat bluntly warned Monday that her party is prepared to let all the Bush-era tax cuts expire and automatic spending cuts to defense and domestic programs take place at the beginning of next year unless Republicans agree to...

A massive landslide sent tons of rock and debris tumbling more than five miles down a glacier in Alaska, the National Park Service reported in an event that could be yet another sign of a warming world. ocated in a remote area of Glacier Bay National Park, the slide was so big it registered on earthquake monitors as a magnitude 3.4 event. Officials noticed the monitor blip on June 11 but it wasn't until July 2 that a pilot passing over the site took photos that showed just how large it was, Glacier Bay National Park announced on its Facebook...

Heat wave, fires have climate change activists on offensive By Ben Geman - 07/06/12 06:00 AM ET Record-breaking heat across the U.S. and catastrophic wildfires in Colorado are giving environmentalists a rare opening to regain the political offensive on climate change. While scientists caution against chalking up specific weather events to climate change, they say generally that heat waves, wildfires and other extreme weather is expected with increasing frequency and intensity in a warming world. Skeptics of climate change often point to winter blizzards as evidence that the planet is not warming; now those who say climate change is a...

Enlarge Image Evidence of the dire condition of coral reefs around the world is being presented in abundance at the 12th International Coral Reef Symposium that got underway yesterday in Cairns, Australia. And scientists are calling for action to stop the losses: More than 2500 marine researchers and managers at the conference and around the world have signed a Consensus Statement on Climate Change and Coral Reefs that calls on "all governments to ensure the future of coral reefs, through global action to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and via improved local protection of...

Germany’s large solar companies have lost almost 25 billion Euros of their stock market value (The German title is: "Solar-Pleitewelle vernichtet Milliarden".) To put it another way, large German solar companies (with one exception) "have lost more than 97 percent of their value since the peak of Germany's government policy-driven solar energy boom.

Climate: While CBS touts a "groundbreaking" government report linking extreme weather and climate change, German researchers find 2,000 years of cooling and warmer temps in medieval times and the Roman era. This summer's heat wave has given the global warmongers new hope in conning the hot and the restless into believing the whole thing is due to that SUV parked in your driveway and that coal-fired plant down the street. Not so fast, say German researchers who documented a two millennia cooling trend. Both the Roman legions and Crusaders marched in warmer climes. On Wednesday's CBS This Morning, CBS News...

Wasn´t global warming supposed to lead to greatly diminished harvests and global food scarcity? Well, tell this to Bill McKibben, Al Gore and the other scarmongers:"Largest ever cereal harvest predicted this year"The world is expected to harvest the largest ever crop of cereals in 2012-13 according to an estimate released by the UN affiliated Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) recently. It is estimated that this year's world cereal production will be a record 2371 million tonnes, marking a 1 percent, or 27 million tonnes increase over 2011. India is forecast to produce a bumper harvest of 234.4 million tonnes of cereals, up from...

Peru’s government on Monday sent 18 trucks carrying 97,000 blankets to villages in the Andean highlands, where the populations endure freezing temperatures.The blankets were sent to Puno, Apurimac, Ayacucho, Junin, Huancavelica, Huanuco, Ancash and La Libertad regions, daily La Republica reported. The shipment is part of the national government plan to provide support to people who are not properly equipped to weather the cold. Children and the elderly are often the most vulnerable to the cold temperatures, and every year a number of people in the highlands die during Peru’s cold winter months of June through August. Last week, temperatures in the district...

Extreme caution best in assessing future weather Published in The Starphoenix July 6, 2012In the viewpoint article Extreme weather becoming norm (SP, June 28) Lidsay Olson, vice-president of the Insurance Bureau of Canada, provides a glimpse of weather extremes for various regions of Canada and warns Canadian to be prepared to live with such extremes over the next several decades. Olson refers to the study on future weather extremes done by Gordon McBean, former assistant deputy minister of Environment Canada. When did Canada witness a climate free of extreme weather, is what Olson fails to explain to Canadians.Extreme weather is...

Wednesday's CBS This Morning hyped a "groundbreaking" new report from federal government scientists that claims "the first-ever statistical connection between extreme weather and man-made climate change." Correspondent Wyatt Andrews spotlighted how the study "found that man-made heat made the Texas drought roughly 20 times more likely." Andrews also hinted a connection between climate change and a recent heat wave, even as he explained that "the biggest reason for the record heat is the transition...from the La Nina weather pattern...to this year's warmer pattern, El Nino." Anchor Erica Hill introduced the correspondent's report by noting how "the first six months of...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) science and its promotion involves selection of only material that supports the hypothesis that human CO2 is causing warming and latterly climate change. It is used in everything from tree ring samples chosen to create the hockey stick, to omission of the Milankovitch Effect, and the role of cosmic rays in the formation of low cloud from IPCC computer models.There’s a similar pattern of selective reporting about weather events. People are inundated with reports giving the impression that what is happening is worse then ever before, unusual and therefore due to human activities....

Rings in fossilised pine trees have proven that the world was much warmer than previously thought - and the earth has been slowly COOLING for 2,000 years. Measurements stretching back to 138BC prove that the Earth is slowly cooling due to changes in the distance between the Earth and the sun. The finding may force scientists to rethink current theories of the impact of global warming. It is the first time that researchers have been able to accurately measure trends in global temperature over the last two millennia. Over that time, the world has been getting cooler - and previous...

Anthony Watts, Lucia Liljegren , and Michael Tobis have all done a good job blogging about Jeff Masters’ egregious math error. His error was that he claimed that a run of high US temperatures had only a chance of 1 in 1.6 million of being a natural occurrence. Here’s his claim: U.S. heat over the past 13 months: a one in 1.6 million eventEach of the 13 months from June 2011 through June 2012 ranked among the warmest third of their historical distribution for the first time in the 1895 – present record. According to NCDC, the odds of this occurring...

Rings in fossilised pine trees have proven that the world was much warmer than previously thought - and the earth has been slowly COOLING for 2,000 years. Measurements stretching back to 138BC prove that the Earth is slowly cooling due to changes in the distance between the Earth and the sun. The finding may force scientists to rethink current theories of the impact of global warming.

Notwithstanding the latest hysterical claims from the sadly politicized climate scientologists of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), insisting 2011 was somehow "a year of extreme weather," serious investigators at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz have just published a sobering analysis in Nature Climate Change which reconstructs 2000 years of climate within northern Europe.Utilizing tree-ring density measurements from sub-fossil pine trees in northern Scandinavia, the investigators created a sequence dating back to 138 BC. The density measurements are closely correlated with the summer temperatures in a targeted region on the edge of the Nordic taiga, enabling them to...

(CNN) -- The mainland United States, which was largely recovering Monday from a near-nationwide heat wave, has experienced the warmest 12 months since record-keeping began in 1895, a top government science and weather agency announced Monday. The report from the National Climatic Data Center, which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, does not take into account blistering heat from this month, with 2,116 high temperature marks either broken or tied between July 2 and July 8 in communities nationwide.